The Dieting Dilemma

Most people live in state of total confusion on the topic of nutrition. We live in a world of fad diets, heavily marketed supplements and quick fix solutions while a group of "experts" offer conflicting information on what to eat and drink. Every week a new diet book or supplement hit’s the shelf stating how you can force yourself to lose weight but the truth be told it’s flawed. This has become big business with more than 60 billion dollars spent each year on diet and weight loss products in the United States [1]. These snake oil products will guarantee that you will be sexy and cool but in reality we are obese, miserable and sick. If you want to have lifelong success don't follow a diet because they don't work! Crash diets force you into a very restrictive lifestyle that does not lead to successful habits.In fact two thirds of those that start a diet will actually gain more weight than what they originally started with [2]. Diet’s don’t work because you need a certain amount of calories everyday and if your body doesn’t get them your body will make you feel tired, hungry and miserable until you give in and binge. The human body is programmed to put on fat, not get rid of it. For most of our existence food was scarce or winter was right around the corner and we never knew where our next meal was going to come from. Now food is abundant and winter is never coming. It is amazing how something so simple has become so heavily debated when in reality everyone is talking about slightly different things.Classic nutritional marketing first starts with creating a problem that doesn’t exist like no matter how much food you eat there still might be a chance that you’re not getting enough protein therefore you consume a packaged protein product with a long shelf life and very little quality nutrition. Instead your getting 40 different highly concentrated corn ingredients which will make you fat. And yes this is very typical of most concentrated protein powders. I encourage you to start reading the ingredients on the back of your favorite powders, these are not only completely unnecessarybut they also provide zero nutrition on a cellular level. Worldwide we are starved of real nutrition like fruits and vegetables but we keep eating food like substances and end up chronically malnourished.

Eat less, take heavily marketed supplements and exercise more is clearly not the answer because we are hardwired where enough is never enough! What makes this public safety issue so frustrating is that the government is actually subsidizing this crisis. It all starts with the corn plant which is sipping fossil fuel in the form of fertilizer, the fertilizer goes into the corn, which goes into our mouths in a broken down into a more heavily concentrated form (in the form of processed food) which is making us fat and sick. Now to complete the vicious cycle we need the pharmaceutical industry to make us better even though adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death causing 100,000 deaths yearly [3].The cards are heavily stacked against us especially when the food companies knowingly keep adding more and more sugar to their products making them more addictive. The cigarette industry for years did the same thing with the concentrations of nicotine before the government actually stepped in. Scientists are all in agreement here that sugar is now commonly accepted as the leading contributor to obesity and many other diseases that dominate the western world. Sugar produces insulin but insulin will distort leptin signals (the hormone that comes from your fat cells to tell your brain that you’re full and to stop eating). In the case with sugar your brain can’t see your leptin and it sees this as starvation. So you just keep eating and eating and end up obese and this is why a calorie is not a calorie when it comes to sugar.All of these factors are leading to a massive obesity epidemic and the destruction of our health care system. For what we spend on our health care we should have it all instead the pharmaceutical and insurance companies are raking in historic profits and population health, satisfaction and cost control are plummeting. Real change starts with taking responsibility for your health and eating real food that allows you to remain healthy. Not relying on a pill or new fad diet but living a lifestyle that will protect you from chronic illness and improve the quality of life for you and your family.